When the professor returned, Moe began wiping away the excess blood with sterile gauze and wiping antiseptic on the wounds. That stung as badly as when her skin had been punctured.
She noticed that he applied no antiseptic to her calves or back. The only places that she had been punctured were the places that Carl had pressed with excess weight. When the chair was used as it had been designed, it caused considerable pain without injury.
“She should get a tetanus shot as soon as possible.” Moe said. “The wounds might be deep enough to introduce an anaerobic infection. I’ll administer the shot if I can see her in the next twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll bring her out to your clinic later this afternoon.”
“Okay.” He applied a last daub of antiseptic to the back of her thigh. “All done. The wounds are too numerous and too small to benefit from bandaging. Leave her on this bench for an hour or so to let them close. They probably won’t open up again when she starts moving around.”
Irene understood that she was to stay lying facedown on the bench. It was completely unnecessary for the professor to tie her down to keep her stationary, but the bench was equipped with convenient straps so he fastened the buckles just to be sure.
After the doctor left, she asked the question that was foremost on her mind. “Why did you let me win the backgammon game?”
“Weren’t you there? I could have sworn that you were playing the white side of the board, watching what happened. You got lucky rolls. I didn’t.”
“Bullshit. I’m not a champion backgammon player but I’ve played enough to know what an expert looks like.”
“What does an expert look like?”
“He looks lucky. He places his men to take advantage of the most likely rolls. When his rolls turn out to be useful more often than not, he looks lucky to people who don’t understand backgammon strategy. You were doing the exact opposite. You were placing your men so that almost any combination of the dice would force you to leave a blot. You are an expert so you not only know how to make yourself look lucky, you know how to make yourself look unlucky.”
He smiled. “You seem to know an awful lot about a game that you say you aren’t skilled at.”
“I know enough to know that I’m nowhere nearly as skilled as you are.”
“Maybe I’m just a fraud. Maybe my reputation as a gamesman is highly overrated.”
“Like your reputation as a sadist?”
“How so?”
“You refer to yourself as a sadist rather freely with your friends. Yet, you seem genuinely concerned for me. More concerned than my previous owners were for their slaves, including me.”
He smiled. “Let me guess. When you realized that a sadist had won you in that poker game, you imagined that I was going to mutilate you, maim you, and eventually torture you to death.”
She blushed. “I didn’t know you, then. I had heard only that you were a sadist.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I’m a sadist, not a sociopath. The popular view of sadism is that they are men who do the vilest things possible to women and then them kill them to get the ultimate thrill. Thinking that sadism is the same as sociopathy is a ridiculous error.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A sociopath has no empathy with another person. What makes me a sadist is the exact opposite. I feel more empathy that most men. When I torture you, I know exactly what you are feeling and I feel it along with you. That’s why I am thrilled to see you endure the pain. Because I know how much it hurts.”
“Then why wouldn’t you get a thrill out of killing me?” She wondered if she should be arguing for her own murder, but she wanted to know the answer. “Wouldn’t that let you feel even stronger emotions?”
“No. I couldn’t enjoy maiming or murdering a woman. That is about destruction, not submission. And even if I thought that I might get some kind of thrill, I wouldn’t do it. There are lines that I will never cross simply because it would be evil to do so. I’m not evil. When Carl sat on you and used his weight to press the tacks into your flesh, he crossed a line. Not very far, but too far for me. I’m not going to give him an chance to do that again.“
Irene lay on the table and felt the sting of the wounds on the backs of her thighs and forearms. “It hurt a lot when he sat on me,” she said, “but not as much as some other things that you’ve done to me.”
“It wasn’t about the pain that he inflicted. He damaged you. That’s the line that he crossed. He didn’t damage you much, but even a small amount of damage is too much.”
Irene decided that, as long as they were talking this openly, she could raise another issue. “Something else puzzles me a little. I’ve noticed that you often use the word, woman, when you’re talking about me.”
“So?”
“You talk about me as though I’m a person. Sometimes you even refer to me as a person. I’m not a person. Not since I sold myself. Now I’m nothing but property. Your property to do with as you please.”
“The gentlemen of the aristocracy make a simple-minded distinction between themselves and slaves by labeling the slaves as no longer human. The lower classes ape them. I don’t. There is a distinction between slave and free for sure, but it’s not simple. In fact, it’s quite complex. You are my property. I don’t dispute that. I can do whatever I want to you. And eventually I will sell you. You don’t have rights to your own body any longer, but that doesn’t stop you from being human. You still have feelings. You still have a will, even if you’re not free to act upon it. You are conscious of yourself and can foresee your future. You are not an automaton and should not be treated as though you are. My treatment of you as a slave includes consideration for your humanity because that’s what makes you interesting. If you were merely an automaton, as the aristocracy pretends, you would be boring and I would have no interest in owning you.”
“My former owners didn’t find me boring.”
“That’s because they used you for only their sexual pleasure, not because they empathized with you. When they used you to satisfy their lust, they paid attention only their own feelings, they didn’t share yours. They missed the best part of you.”
She wasn’t sure that she accepted his assertion. It seemed to her that her previous owners had enjoyed giving her orgasms, even if she was only their slave. But she didn’t feel like arguing the point.
The professor, being a professor, had to probe whether she understood what he had been saying. “Now, do you understand why I don’t torture you constantly?”
She did understand. “Because you wouldn’t be able to empathize with my pain if it were constant. It would be uninteresting.”
“Exactly.” He looked pleased with his pupil.
He turned away from her and looked at the chair for a while. “I think I’ll modify it so that the spikes only protrude by an eight of an inch. I can press an eighth inch cardboard liner over them.”
“It won’t look as scary if you do that.” Irene understood that these devices were as much a psychological torture as a physical one. “It worked quite well before Carl sat on me. I was suffering considerable pain but the spikes weren’t penetrating my skin. At least not enough to cause noticeable wounds. Instead of shortening the length of the spikes, you could put a couple of bars across the lap. They would act as an additional restraint, but at the same time, they’d prevent anyone from sitting on me. You’d only have to drill a couple of holes in the sides of the arms to slide the bars through.”
“So you’d be restrained by both the bars and the straps across your thighs?”
“No need for the straps on the thighs. Straps are necessary to keep my torso, arms and calves in contact with the spikes, but not for my butt and thighs. There’s no way to keep my body weight off the seat of the chair. If I try to raise my thighs, it would put more weight on my butt and vice versa.”
The professor thought for a minute and then said, “I think you’re right. I’ll do that instead of trying to shorten the
spikes.”
“It hurts like hell to sit in it. It may as well look as nasty as it feels.”
“That’s the idea. It has to look good for the show.”
“Show?”
He looked at her. “Don’t you know about the show? I’d have thought that you’d have heard me talking about it. I’m not just a critic and historian; I’m also an artist. I stage a show of my own art every few years. The last one was preserved foods and the one before was photographs of different forms of water. I’ve never displayed my torture machines as art so I decided that it was about time. The exhibition will be called The Fine Art of Torture. Not an imaginative title, but an accurate description.”
She looked around the studio. “You have the Spanish horse, the torture chair, the pillory, and the bed of nails.”
“And you’re laying on the whipping bench. It’s adjustable so that a person can be whipped prone, kneeling, or erect. I added pads and put it almost upright when I strapped you to it to torture your nipple the first day.”
She shuddered at the memory of that ordeal. “Are you going to include the nipple torture? I still cringe when I remember that one.”
“No. It’s too technical. I want the brutality of the torture devices to be visually striking. A grey box with dials and knobs wouldn’t mean anything to anybody.” He glanced toward the door to his workshop. “I’ll include the crucifixion frame. It doesn’t look as brutal as the others until you’re mounted in it. Then the cruelty is apparent.”
“It sounds like you’re going to torture me during the exhibition?”
“You’re going to be a star,” he replied.
Being mounted on these devices, one after another for hour after hour was a terrifying thought. “How long will the show last?”
“Ten hours a day for a week.”
She felt the blood drain from her face. “I don’t think that I could survive seventy hours of torture in a week.”
“Sure you could. The devices cause pain but not serious injury or death. Not unless the same joints and muscles are stressed for too long at one time. But you won’t have to worry about that. You won’t be the only slave in the exhibition. And no one will be mounted in any device for more than a couple of hours in a day. You’ll feel a lot of pain during the course of the seven days, I can promise that, but it will be bearable.”
Bearable was a disingenuous term to use with a slave. Slaves had no choice but to bear whatever was done to them. They were Nietzsche’s strong people under his dictum that whatever does not kill a person makes her stronger. Much is done to a slave that does not kill her.
Personally, Irene thought that Nietzsche was an ass.
Before, when she looked at the professor’s devices, she had considered only how much pain each would inflict. Now, to the extent permitted by the straps that bound her belly down to the table, she looked around the studio with a new perspective. “Your devices are as beautiful as pieces of fine furniture.”
They had been built with high-quality woods – birds-eye maple, mahogany, rosewood, cherry, walnut, and more – that had been sanded, sealed, and varnished with care. The fittings were polished brass and brushed steel. The straps and pads were made of fine leather.
“The woman struggling against the pain is the real beauty. The device that causes the pain should enhance the aesthetics of her agony in the same way that the proper frame enhances a beautiful oil painting.”
She understood what he was saying. If one accepted his twisted premise – that pain is beauty – then his conclusion followed with perfect logic. But she didn’t have to agree with it.
She lay on the hard bench in silence for a while, thinking about torture as art. “Professor?”
“What?”
“I have spare time most days, even after writing my essays, reading from your library, and keeping the house clean. I’d like to try something different.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like your permission to use your workshop to build a new torture device for your show. One of my own design.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You want to build a device that I can use to torture you?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. You’re going to build a feather bed that you can lie in while I fan a cool breeze on you. You’ll wake up and shriek terribly every so often and pretend that you’re suffering the agonies of hell before falling back into blissful slumber.”
She laughed. “I would if I thought that I could get away with it. But, no, that’s not my intent. An ordeal in my device will be every bit as agonizing as in any one of your devices.”
“How?”
“Let me build it and you will see.”
“Now you’ve made the cat curious. Go ahead and build your device.”
“Will you teach me how to work with wood? How to use your tools?”
“It will be my pleasure.”
* * *
Irene had lived in Westmouth for years but had never been to the local university. She had been educated at the Walden Lyceum in her home city of Calam Shire, several hundred miles to the southeast in the dry lands. All universities felt about the same, though. She liked the academic atmosphere.
Moe’s clinic was attached to the medical school, but it was at the edge of the campus. Patients could come in the front door without setting foot on the university campus proper.
She was surprised that Moe had let the professor bring her to his clinic at all. Most slaves were treated in their kennels by doctors who were no more esteemed than veterinarians. She expected to be smuggled in the back door, treated, and whisked away, unseen by the other clients.
A pleasure slave with her hair worn long to hide her identity tattoo and her unrestrained breasts bouncing and flopping under the thin fabric of a housedress was hardly a high-status accessory for Moe’s waiting room.
But the professor brought her in the front door, gave her instructions on how to find his office later, and sent her in alone to wait with all the rest of the clinic’s patients.
The waiting room was packed. Being attached to the medical school, she had expected that it would service mostly students. To the contrary, three-quarters of the clinic’s clientele appeared to be well-off commoners mixed with a smattering of ladies and gentlemen from the aristocracy.
She was grateful that no one in the room was a former friend or acquaintance from when she had been the wife of a lord.
They all stared at her as she walked across the room to one of the few empty seats. She chose the one in a dim corner where she would be the least conspicuous.
One of the ladies, in a stage whisper intended to carry throughout the room, said to another, “Looks like they let anyone come in here.”
The other lady tsked loudly.
A man in a fine silk suit sniggered.
Irene tried not to blush.
A nurse opened a door, poked her head out and said, “Lady Sundstrum?”
A women in a full purple gown rose gracefully from her seat and crossed the room. When she was within speaking distance of the nurse, she said, “I hope that you don’t intend to give me a blood transfusion from a disease-ridden slut.”
“No, ma’am,” the nurse said, “the doctor’s just going to look at your throat today.”
When the door closed, the woman who had tsked about her said, “Are you wearing a dog collar?”
Irene ignored her.
The woman was not to be deterred. “I asked you a question, slave. Answer me. Are you wearing a dog collar?”
Irene looked at her and said, “No. This was specially made for me. It’s a piece of fine jewelry.”
“Take it off. Let me have a look at it.”
“No, ma’am. It doesn’t come off. It’s permanently fastened.”
The woman peered at it. “Is that writing on it? What does it say?”
Irene held her head high. “It says Slave Irene.”
“Irene’s not a slave’s name.” The woman sniffed indignant
ly.
Another woman, this one dressed as a high-born lady, snapped her head around to stare at her. “You’re Irene?”
“Do I know you?” Irene asked.
“I should hope not,” the lady replied. “Nobody wants to know you. Not since you sold yourself into slavery.”
A man in a business suit said, “You sold yourself?”
Irene nodded. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
The gentleman who had sniggered earlier now laughed aloud.
“How did that work?” the man in the business suit asked.
“Easily enough,” Irene replied “I was at a slave auction with my husband. I climbed up on the auction block and told the auctioneer to sell me. He did. It was just a whim.”
“That was some whim.”
Irene smiled. “I’ve had moments when I regretted my impulsiveness.”
“What did your husband think about your whim?”
“I don’t know. He walked out of the auction and I haven’t seen him since.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I was. I thought that he would have wanted to buy me.”
The nurse poked her head back out. “Mr. Cantor?”
The man who was talking to Irene walked away without bidding her goodbye.
No one spoke again for a while. The other women stared hatefully at her. Irene expected no less. No high-born wife or well-to-do common woman could look at a pleasure slave without imagining her husband being entertained by her. When you’re talking about a pleasure slave, entertaining a gentleman, is just a euphemism for fucking him in whatever kinky way he wants. Not an image that would please any man’s wife.
The men in the room sneaked quick peeks at her when they thought that the other women wouldn’t notice. Their lust made their eyes smolder like embers.
She wondered why she had been sent to sit in the waiting room. Surely Moe realized that it was disrespectful to his other patients. He wasn’t thick; he seemed to be a highly intelligent man who had a keen sense of social mores.
Other patients were called. More people arrived. The newcomers’ reactions were almost comical. They entered, looked at the empty seats, sat down, looked around, and then jerked in surprise when they noticed her sitting in the back corner. After spending a moment checking her hair, clothes, and collar to make sure that they weren’t mistaken – that a pleasure slave was actually sitting in the room with them – they invariably scanned the faces of all the other people waiting. When they ascertained that the other people were studiously ignoring the slave in their midst, they tried to do the same. But it would take several minutes of surreptitious glances before they could get their curiosity under control.
The Fine Art of Torture (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 3) Page 8